"Whereupon the girl, quite unawed by the horrible proposition, replied with baffling complacency, 'It shall if you like, sir'!"
From the fact of the Red Lion Square rooms being unfurnished came practically the beginnings of Morris's work as a decorator and manufacturer. He set to work to provide it with "intensely mediæval furniture," designed by himself, and painted in panels afterwards by Rossetti and Burne-Jones. There were tables, chairs, and a large settle; "chairs," says Rossetti, "such as Barbarossa might have sat in." It is pleasant to think of Morris and Rossetti walking arm-in-arm on summer evenings, wending their way through quaint alleys up to the Red Lion Square lodgings, deep in earnest conversation; young, intensely busy and hopeful—still more intensely full of "the joy of life." They spent their holidays at the not far distant Zoological Gardens, where Morris, who was fond of birds, would observe and imitate the habits of eagles:
"He would imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to a chair, and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft heavy flop; and for some time an owl was one of the tenants of Red Lion Square, in spite of a standing feud between it and Rossetti."
Morris had several Bloomsbury abodes. Later, when he married, and the Red Lion Square household broke up, he and his wife went into lodgings at 41, Great Ormond Street; and again, some five or six years later, they took an old house, 26 Queen Square, (now pulled down to make room for a hospital), a house which, with its yard and outbuildings behind, had room and to spare for his family, and also for workshops to accommodate his increasing trade as a decorative manufacturer. It is sad that London houses where Morris lived should bear no trace of his beautifying hand; for externally, it must be confessed, such of his Bloomsbury dwellings as remain extant are commonplace. Red Lion Square, a curiously antiquated enclosure near Holborn, approached by paved diverging alleys at the eastern corners, and with a pathetic look of having known better days (it is now mostly offices and business flats), contains but few dwelling-houses. No. 17 still stands, but the only thing about it that seems to suggest the Morris tradition is its plain green door; and it differs from its neighbours merely by its middle first-floor window being "heightened up to the ceiling" as already described. Neither is 41, Great Ormond Street—one of the smaller houses in that dignified old street—in any way remarkable, except for its rather dilapidated look. It seems a pity, by the way, that tablets do not more frequently indicate the houses where great people have lived; the dullest of London streets would gain infinitely in interest were this the rule, instead of merely the exception.
Queen Square, though its old houses have mostly been rebuilt as large hospitals, and only a few of them remain, still has a charming old world look. Great Ormond Street, with its tall old mansions of time-darkened red brick, their quaint overhanging porch roofs, and their often elaborate iron-work, runs into it at one end; while the other—curious anomaly at this date!—is still a deadlock of enclosed gardens, with no thoroughfare into dull Guilford street beyond. This,—and it is a fact that of itself speaks well for the health of the district,—is a region of hospitals; hence the occasional whiff of ether or scent of iodine from bandaged "out-patients" that greets the traveller by omnibus up Southampton Row. The high ground on which Bloomsbury is built (for it is a gradual ascent all the way from the river to Russell Square) render it, its fogs and soot notwithstanding,—and despite the old tradition that the victims of the plague were mainly buried here,—far more bracing then the more fashionable West End. It has, certainly, its quota of fogs, or "London particulars" as Sam Weller called them; but so have other parts of London. In and about Great Ormond Street and Queen Square are many hospitals; large, airy, and splendidly managed institutions, such, for instance, as the well-known Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, (abused as "hideous" by Mr. Hare, principally because "two interesting houses, Nos. 48 and 49," of real Queen Anne architecture, were destroyed in 1882 to enlarge it); the National Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis, under the great Dr. Ferrier; and the tall newly-built Alexandra Hospital for children. In Powis Place, close to Queen Square, Lord Macaulay lived in early manhood with his family. The house is now joined to the Homœopathic Hospital.
In Great Ormond Street, also, on the northern side, is the "Working Men's College," the history of which is so deeply associated with Ruskin, Rossetti, Madox Brown, and their friends. Started first by F. D. Maurice at 31, Red Lion Square, (where Rossetti and Ruskin subsequently volunteered to hold classes, Rossetti "teaching mechanics to draw each other," and Ruskin instructing them in the more rudimentary art of copying leaves, flowers, &c., according to the "strictest school of Ruskinianism;")—it was subsequently moved to its present site. In the lives of this gifted community of artists and teachers, the Working Men's College played no small part, and showed how deeply these young men were actuated, not only by the love of art, but also by the feeling of universal brotherhood advocated later by Morris in the social Utopia he propounded in one of his best known works. The story of the College may be read in many books and biographies. The kind of thing it practised, being rare in those days, attracted strangers and philanthropic aristocrats, who came to look on and to wonder. Irreverent stories, indeed, are told of the classes there by mild scoffers,—such as W. B. Scott, for instance,—who describes Mr. Ruskin's class, as follows:
"We drove into Red Lion Square, and here I found ... every one trying to put on small pieces of paper, imitations by pen and ink of pieces of rough stick crusted with dry lichens!... I came away feeling that such pretence of education was in a high degree criminal—it was intellectual murder!"
For Mr. Scott, who was, as he says, "the representative of the Government schools," some allowance must be made; but Dante Rossetti himself, though he held a "life"-class, also saw the comic side. "You think," he said to Mr. Scott:
"You think I have turned humanitarian, perhaps, but you should see my class for the model! None of your Freehand Drawing-Books used. The British mind is brought to bear on the British mug at once, and with results that would astonish you."
On the actual value of these things, opinions, as we see, may differ; but who can doubt the indirect good that resulted from the effort, both to teachers and to taught?